Crossing the Pleistocene-Holocene transition in the New Guinea Highlands: Evidence from the lithic assemblage of Kiowa rockshelter

This paper emphasises sub-regional variation in the timing and nature of subsistence changes in the New Guinea Highlands at the Pleistocene-Holocene transition. An analysis of the Kiowa lithic assemblage was used to examine the interplay between tool technology, mobility levels, and subsistence strategies by investigating changes in the procurement, manufacture, and use of different raw stone materials in an overall lithic technology. Throughout Kiowa's occupation local stone was used extensively, and over time people increased their knowledge of the local lithic landscape, using more diverse local raw materials. Since the terminal Pleistocene, people carried reliable polished axes for a variety of activities and made expedient use of locally abundant river pebbles, while smaller nodules were located and carried as mobile toolkits to facilitate longer distance hunting and collecting excursions. In the mid Holocene exotic raw materials were also traded from more distant zones. The abandonment of Kiowa in the late Holocene shows that hunting became less economically important as cultivation developed in the area. Technological changes, in combination with changes in faunal remains are suggestive of increasing activity at Kiowa through the Holocene as the site became specialised for bat hunting, perhaps driven by restricted land use and reduced mobility, reciprocally affected by increasing populations and the intensification of plant food production in the Highlands generally. Despite this, evidence for changes to horticulture around Kiowa itself, in the Chimbu area, is limited to the mid-late Holocene, indicating that the early development of agriculture in the Wahgi may have been relatively localised, and did not necessarily displace existing subsistence strategies elsewhere in the Highlands.